>>7125452Price is somewhat a factor, but the bigger issue is the difficulty in acquiring a preorder for a lot of these things, and how hard it is to jump in. At MSRP the Arcadia and Bandai valks are alright, but at the $200+ they jump to on the secondary market, not so much. especially Arcadia where they're pretty old molds or reworks of older figures that got heavily discounted in a lot of cases. Its very hard to recommend someone pay $300-500 for a figure of an important Valk, especially since the nature of Macross means collecting a lot of variations of the same figure for a complete squadron.
As a casual collector of these myself,I'd recommend anyone who wants to start go for an Arcadia VF-1, or Bandai renewal VF-25. I know the smaller, cheaper Hi-metal releases are tempting, but if you missed out on them you're basically screwed on the aftermarket Plus the variety just isn't there.I find that, not being a completionist and only owning a few valks across all the series, I love seeing a bunch of different designs in the same scale. It makes me appreciate the evolution of the series design
And with arcadia, they might just crank out another Hikaru VF-1J, Roy TV VF-1s, etc. If you wait you can probably get all the major SDFM valks if you start now. The Max/Milia VF-1J figures are great jumping on points.
